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Mental health disorders are among the leading worldwide causes of disease and long-term disability. This issue has a long and painful history of gradual de-stigmatization of patients, coinciding with humanization of therapeutic approaches. What are the current trends in Russia regarding this issue and in what ways is it similar to and different from Western countries? IQ.HSE provides an overview of this problem based on research carried out by Svetlana Kolpakova.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

Dr. Sabyasachi Tripathi, from Kolkata, India, is a new research fellow at HSE University. He will be working at the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

Book

Research Handbook on Economic Models of Law

One of the great successes of the law and economics movement has been the use of economic models to explain the structure and function of broad areas of law. The original contributions to this volume epitomize that tradition, offering state-of-the-art research on the many facets of economic modeling in law.

The contributors employ a variety of economic methodologies to explore a wide range of topics, including torts, contracts, property, crime, employment, the environment, and legal procedure. This depth and breadth of scholarship reflect the continuing vitality of the economic approach to law, offering an illuminating look into the future of the field and providing inspiration and guidance for the next generation of theorists.

This timely volume will appeal to students, professors and researchers in both law and economics, particularly those with an interest in the theoretical and practical intersections of the two fields.

In civil litigation, although most cases settle before trial, many do not settle early, and some do not settle at all. Delayed settlement or impasse causes high costs for the parties and for society. Babcock et al. (1995a, 1997), Babcock and Loewenstein (1997) and Loewenstein et al. (1993) propose an explanation for disputes that rests on a judgment error called ìself-serving bias.î Self-serving bias refers to the litigantís biased beliefs that the court decision will favor his case due to the interpretation of the facts of the dispute in his own favor. In information environments characterized by ambiguity, even when the parties are exposed to the exact same information, they might arrive at expectations of an adjudicated settlement that are biased in a self-serving manner. As a result, higher likelihood of disputes might be observed. Note that the litigation outcomes might influence potential injurersí level of care, i.e., their expenditures on accident prevention (Png, 1987; Landeo et al., 2006, 2007a, 2007b). Hence, the defendantís level of care, social welfare and the effects of tort reform might also be affected by self-serving bias. Despite the active experimental literature on self-serving bias and pretrial bargaining, and the robustness of these findings, there has been very little theoretical work on this topic. This chapter presents a strategic model of incentives for care and litigation under asymmetric information and self-serving bias, and studies the effects of caps on non-economic damages.

Youth are, by definition, the future. This book brings initial analyses to bear on youth in the five BRICS countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which are home to nearly half of the world's youth. Very little is known about these youth outside of their own countries since the mainstream views on "youth" and "youth culture" are derived from the available literature on youth in the industrialized West, which is home to a small part of the world's youth. This book aims to help fill in this gap.

The handbook examines the state of youth, their past, present and permits the development of insights about future. The BRICS countries have all engaged in development processes and some remarkable improvements in young people's lives over recent decades are documented. However, the chapters also show that these gains can be undermined by instabilities, poor decisions and external factors in those countries. Periods of economic growth, political progress, cultural opening up and subsequent reversals rearticulate differently in each society. The future of youth is sharply impacted by recent transformations of economic, political and social realities. As new opportunities emerge and the influence of tradition on youth's lifestyles weakens and as their norms and values change, the youth enter into conflict with dominant expectations and power structures.

The topics covered in the book include politics, education, health, employment, leisure, Internet, identities, inequalities and demographics. The chapters provide original insights into the development of the BRICS countries, and place the varied mechanisms of youth development in context. This handbook serves as a reference to those who are interested in having a better understanding of today's youth. Readers will become acquainted with many issues that are faced today by young people and understand that through fertile dialogues and cooperation, youth can play a role in shaping the future of the world.

The subject matter of the article lies between public law and economics. The article contains sources of legal regulation in state corporations, ways of their forming, jurisdiction, priorities and results of its activities achieved in western democracies. The author stresses the dependence of effectiveness of this public law institute on checks and balances as well as individual responsibility, responsibility for doings and refraining from doing by authorities, reputation of officials.

Since formal laws can be observed or ignored to varying degrees, the actual enforcement regime shapes incentives and constraints. Most of the studies exploring EPL effects on labour market performance implicitly assume that EPL compliance is near to complete and therefore all firms bear full adjustment costs incurred by the regulations. This seems to be a very strong assumption for any country but it sounds especially strong and hardly plausible for developing and transition economies. But if compliance and enforcement varies widely across regions/cities or segments of firms, then this variation is likely to cause variation in performance. This paper looks at Russia in particular. The main idea of this paper is to analize cross-regional and inter-temporal variation in EPL enforcement and to explore empirically whether it is translated into regional labour market outcomes. The paper employs unique data set based on the State Labour Inspectorate data and the Supreme Court statistics on labour disputes.

The authors use the newly available Yugoslavian Labor Force Survey data to investigate wage differentials and employment decisions in the state and private sectors in Yugoslavia. For the analysis the authors use three empirical models that rely on different statistical assumptions. They extend the standard switching regression model to allow non-normality in the joint distribution of the error terms. After correcting for the sector selection bias and controlling for workers' characteristics the authors find a private sector wage advantage. The wage premium is largest for workers with low education levels and declining for workers with higher educational levels. Given the regulatory and tax policies that pushed the private sector into the informal sphere of the economy during the period covered by our data, the authors argue that the state-private wage gap is likely to grow in the future. This will make it increasingly difficult for the state sector to attract and retain highly skilled employees.

The paper discusses how the russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. it starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of europe outside of the cis. having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries.

Research is carried out article criminally-legal mechanism property protection, its communication with the inflationary and deflationary processes which have become aggravated in the conditions of financial crisis. By the analysis of communication of the criminal law with economic processes it is established that it aggravates property stratification of a modern society.

In order to remain competitive, firms need to keep the quantity and composition of jobs close to optimal for their given output. Since the beginning of the transition period, Russian industrial firms have been widely reporting that the quantity and composition of hired labour is far from being optimal. This paper discusses what kinds of firms in the Russian manufacturing sector are unable to optimize their employment and why. The main conclusion is that the key issue is an excess of nonviable firms and a shortage of highly efficient firms because of weak selection mechanisms. The main solution is seen to be the creation of institutional conditions that stimulate a more efficient reallocation of labour. The analysis presented in this chapter is based on data from a large-scale survey of Russian manufacturing firms.

Sharunina A. In bk.: Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference for Doctoral Students and Young Researchers EDAMBA 2012. Bratislava: Publishing House EKONOM, 2012. P. 1075-1084.

In this paper the public-private wage gap is estimated by means both of the OLS and the quantile regression, which will provide a more complex picture of the distribution of the public-private sector wage gap. The author finds the existence of significant public-private wage gap (about 30%) considering both observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and jobs. Using the decomposition based on quantile regression helps to answer the question about the nature of the wage differences. The author comes to the conclusion that the main reason for the gap is the institutional mechanisms of public sector wages in Russia. The analysis is based on the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) 2000-2010.

In the article the international experience of management of employment in the public sector is shown, corresponding numerical calculations are given, the thought on possibility of its use in Russia is stated. The author believes that transfer of some functions into outsourcing in frameworks of the policy of the new public management (NPM) can be one of directions of perfection of the management of employment efficiency and payment in the public sector. Simultaneously he expresses his conviction that reduction of the number of the occupied should not be mechanical, but the thought over and gradual process assuming simultaneous increase of efficiency of activity in the sphere of the public management.

Russia’s transition towards a market economy in the early 1990s called for new approaches to the regulation of employment relations in the post-Soviet era in order to strike a balance between employers’ interests and employees’ rights in modern conditions. Adopted in 2001, the Labour Code of the Russian Federation (hereafter: LC RF) contributed to solving the issue only partly, for it was actually passed as a compromise between different political forces. As a result, it consists both of provisions which can be implemented in the new context of the market economy and restrictions inherited from a planned economy.

It soon became apparent that Russian employment legislation was in need of further development to adapt to ever-changing socio-economic conditions and the increasing complexity of the employer-employee relationship resulting from globalization and technological progress.

This state of affairs resulted in extensive amendments to the LC RF, in particular in 2006, when the majority of the provisions were profoundly revised. However, previous experience shows that many aspects concerning the legal regulation of employment relations are far from being addressed, not least compliance with international standards and practical needs at a national level.

In this special issue of the ADAPT Labour Studies BOOK-SERIES the authors try to achieve a twofold objective: rate recent developments of Russian labour law from a practical and a theoretical point of view and reveal its new challenges.

The paper examines the institute of minimum wage in developed and transition economies and in a number of the developing countries. First of all the institutional mechanism of minimum wage fixing is considered. One of the sections explores the dynamics of absolute and relative levels of minimum wage. The special attention is paid to the impact of the institute of minimum wage on the labour market. The author considers the mechanism of transmission of the minimum wage increases on the employment and unemployment dynamics. The paper also contains the result of the empirical research. The experience of many countries witnesses that large increases in minimum wage levels lead to the stagnation of the employ-ment, especially of the disadvantaged groups. The negative effect is larger for the companies with higher share of labour costs and more active use of unqualified labour, that is small businesses and agricultural enterprises. One of the main conclusions is that the minimum wage is not an effective tool of the poverty reduction as the majority of the recipients live in households of average and upper average income.